Toronto’s use of municipal laws lack diversity and sense

Ten years ago, Mariana Valverde and a colleague of hers at the University of Toronto came up with an informal project: walk to the corner of Bloor and St. George streets and map out every municipal law that stacked up at the intersection. Why are the sidewalks as wide as they are, and who can sell food on them? Where can you park, and how must you cross the street?

It was 2002, when local and provincial politicians were getting serious about the idea of increasing Toronto’s legal powers, and four years before the new (and, frankly, underwhelming) City of Toronto Act would be passed.

But before asking what kind of legal powers Toronto should have, “what I thought would make a more interesting story would be to document how the city uses the legal powers that it does have,” Valverde says.

The professor of socio-legal studies decided to apply her project’s methodology to municipal law. For four years, she and her research students attended committee of adjustment meetings all over the city. They rode in cars with bylaw enforcement officers, witnessed the daily scraps that never make it to the Ontario Municipal Board or in the newspapers, and looked for patterns in the community issues that did. Valverde’s observations are recounted in her book Everyday Law on the Street, which comes out this month.

The scope is wide, from housing to street food to the way taxis are licensed. But the common problem Valverde and her team came across was that Toronto law and how it’s enforced often doesn’t address the city’s diverse makeup — the very thing we claim to hold dear about this place, and something that doesn’t always mean ethnic diversity, either.

She insists: “If we are serious about diversity, we have to look at forms of diversity that have been not only neglected, but have become worse.”

Take, for example, the way we keep house. Property standards listed in our Municipal Code are geared more towards “the regulation of taste,” as she puts it, than for safety or environmental concerns. Section 629.11 of that bylaw, for example, is concerned with how tall your front-yard grass can grow and what kinds of decorative — but not agricultural — things you can plant in between. She is told early on in her research by a municipal officer that a blind eye is usually turned to these regulations in areas with large concentrations of Italian-Canadians.

“Even when laws are not actually enforced,” she writes, “they are often used to warn and morally regulate private citizens.”
Indeed, many of the enforcement issues Valverde’s researchers encountered in their ride-alongs involved yards, and also noise. Not only because it was summer, but because weeds and bass rumbles tend to generate complaints (which largely informs MLS officer stops) and are easier to inspect (they don’t require entry of property).

“It was fascinating for me, as somebody who teaches criminology, to see that they’re not interested in enforcing the bylaw. In fact, most bylaws it would be impossible or ridiculous to actually try to enforce them. What they try to do is mediate and do conflict resolution.”

While addressing complaints directly maintains some sense of service between city and resident, it also lends a considerable amount of weight to the kind of resident who would, say, bring up a neighbour’s ethnic origin, criminal record or drinking habit as reasons to consider or discredit a complaint — all situations witnessed during enforcement ride-alongs.

There’s also diversity in how we house ourselves. “If a tenant [vs. a homeowner] phones in to complain about the building being in poor shape or about noise, garbage, whatever, oftentimes the tenants get less service from MLS. Their complaints aren’t listened to as much or aren’t treated quite as seriously.”

A bias towards single-family detached home ownership presented itself when it came to public consultations about public housing or rooming houses — themselves a fragmented category, since rooming houses don’t have a licensing system across all former boroughs of Toronto. In the parts of old Toronto and Etobicoke that do, Valverde explains, residents will often attend the licensing hearings of nearby rooming houses to try to prevent the “undesirable” building from getting its licence renewed. Even the rest of Toronto — where rooming-style houses aren’t licensed, and aren’t illegal — similar tensions flare up.

“Politicians always listen to the squeaky wheels; it’s in their nature. You’re not going to change the fact that councillors are always going to listen to the small number of people who regularly phone them, email them, show up to consultations.” Actions, Valverde says, that require a mix of things not all Torontonians immediately have: knowledge of civic processes, a good command of English, spare time — the conviction that their opinion can make a difference.

So how to effect change? Get the community involved on an ongoing basis — not just for condo proposals or when a neighbour wants to build a second storey on his house.

“Right now we have [four] community councils, which are made up of nothing but councillors. The name is a total misnomer, to call them community councils when there isn’t a single member of the community on them. That to me is a legal-political structure that’s gotta go.”

Valverde brings up the New York model of community boards, entities comprised of mostly residents, business owners and some city employees that meet regularly and advise the city on land use, budget and bylaw issues.

“We need legal mechanisms that help the community to get involved, get empowered and look at neighbourhoods and the city as a whole.”

Valverde’s book launch is Nov. 9, 5 p.m., at the Centre for Criminology and Socio-legal Studies, 14 Queen’s Park Cres. For more information, visit criminology.utoronto.ca.